Speed test your Telstra internet

If you’ve been tempted into signing up for a Telstra NBN plan, great news! You’re with one of the fastest providers in Australia. While that speed comes at a cost, Telstra offers plans on every NBN speed tier, except for the bare-bolts NBN 12, which isn’t a bad thing because we consider NBN 25 to be the true minimum for home internet.

Read on for how to run a Telstra internet speed test, what speeds you should expect from Telstra NBN plans, what the results mean, and how Telstra fares against the competition.

Use the internet speed test widget below to run a speed test for your Telstra NBN connection (it also works with other providers as well as mobile internet). Simply click or tap on the ‘Start Speed Test’ button, wait about 10 seconds, and you’ll see a result for your download speed, represented in megabits per second (Mbps).

Click or tap on ‘Show More Info’ to also check the latency of your connection and test the upload speed, which should also take roughly 10 seconds. Bear in mind that the most accurate results come from testing on a single device while other devices in your home aren’t streaming, downloading, videoconferencing or doing any number of other online activities that use shared bandwidth. For better results, use an Ethernet connection where possible (or 5GHz WiFi close to the router or modem-router), and for the ultimate results, run an Ethernet connection between a computer and your modem or modem-router.

Usually, there’d be a disclaimer here about speed differences between the day and the typically busy evening period, but Telstra offers download speeds that should match the max potential of your speed tier (except for Telstra’s NBN 1000 plan, which still clocks in at an impressive 700Mbps).

Telstra offers plans on NBN 25, NBN 50, NBN 100, NBN 250 and NBN 1000 speed tiers, and it’s a rare provider that boasts parity between max potential download speeds for its NBN speed tiers and self-reported typical download speeds. The only exception there is for its fastest NBN 1000 plan, but at 700Mbps self-reported typical evening download speeds, it’s still comfortably the fastest in our comparison engine.

Here’s what download speeds you can expect from all of Telstra’s NBN plans:

• Telstra NBN 25: 25Mbps download
• Telstra NBN 50: 50Mbps download
• Telstra NBN 100: 100Mbps download
• Telstra NBN 250: 250Mbps download
• Telstra NBN 1000: 700Mbps download

There are a few caveats, though. Telstra notes that its NBN 50 plans may offer download speeds slower than 50Mbps for most Fibre-to-the-Node connections. For its NBN 100 plans, Telstra only sells these to homes connected by Fibre-to-the-Premises, Hybrid Fibre Coaxial and Fibre-to-the-Curb technologies. Similarly, Telstra’s NBN 250 plans are only available to FTTP homes and some HFC homes, while its NBN 1000 plans can only be ordered for FTTP homes and a small number of HFC homes.

As touched on above, Telstra is the fastest provider of NBN 1000 plans in our comparison engine and the same is also true for NBN 250 plans. Let’s take a closer look at how Telstra’s NBN plans fare against other providers in our database on different speed tiers.

Because there are only a couple of providers these days that don’t offer parity between max potential NBN 25 download speeds and self-reported typical evening download speeds, Telstra has plenty of competition here. As a more expensive provider, don’t expect to see Telstra listed below, even if its plans boast the same 25Mbps download speeds.

It’s a similar story for NBN 50 plans, with only a few providers in our comparison engine offering self-reported typical evening download speeds (marginally) below 50Mbps. Again, Telstra tends to be the most expensive provider here, so don’t expect to see them in the round-up of plans below even though it offers 50Mbps download speeds.

Things start to level out more when it comes to NBN 100 plans, even if Telstra is still one of the more expensive providers. There are only a handful of providers in our database that offer 100Mbps download speeds, which you can see in the daily updating list below alongside Telstra.

When it comes to NBN 250 plans, Telstra offers the fastest self-reported typical evening download speeds, ahead of a few contenders before the speeds drop closer to 200Mbps.

As mentioned above, Telstra is peerless when it comes to speeds for its NBN 1000 plans. At the time of writing, Telstra was at least an NBN Fast connection ahead of its nearest competitor and well ahead of all other NBN 1000 providers.